Frankenthaler, Louis and Noland
formed the core of a
group known as the colour field painters, though the critic Clement Greenberg preferred one of his own clunking coinages, «post-painterly abstractionists», meaning that
after the «painterly» surfaces of the abstract expressionists, the purely colour - based paintings of Noland and the others marked out a different and more advanced
stage of art's march to absolute abstraction.